The present invention relates generally to fiber optic transmission (transport) systems, and more particularly to the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in optical networks.
Optical OFDM provides sub-wavelength channels through orthogonal subcarriers and offers high flexibility in traffic grooming, sub-wavelength allocation, network and link virtualization. Optical OFDM has been used in a variety of different networks including in access/metro networks, home networks, core networks, and virtual passive optical networks.
For example, when OFDM techniques are used to transmit optical signals in an optical core network having edge routers, data flows transmitted from an ingress edge router to another peer egress edge router travel through the optical domain on a wavelength. The wavelength may contain a large number of OFDM subcarriers. Multiple data flows transmitted within the network may be mapped to respective OFDM subcarriers and carried on a single wavelength